Computer systems are currently in wide use. Some computer systems are deployed by organizations, such as enterprise organizations, in order to assist the organization in performing its operations.
Some computer systems, of this type, can be modified before they are deployed at an end user organization. For instance, some systems are originally manufactured by a manufacturer. They can then be modified by an independent software vendor (ISV) or another developer to obtain a customized system. The customized system can then be sold to an end user organization, where it is even further customized before it is deployed.
At times, the computing system that is deployed at the end user may be replacing an existing solution that the organization is using. In that case, data from the existing system is sometimes entered into the new computing system.
In these types of scenarios, the base computing system manufactured by the computing system manufacturer may be a relatively generic system, that is not specific to any given industry. In order to set up an industry-specific application of the computing system, the end users or developers have often needed to carry out a great deal of configuration and customization of the generic system. Therefore, two different solutions that are generated for the same industry (even though they derive from the same base system), may be completely different, even though they are performing relatively similar functions, because they are both separately customized and configured from the base system. For instance, the operations for customizing the computing systems to that specific industry were repeated for each individual application, often by different people. Therefore, while the end solutions may operate similarly, they may be provided in a very different way.
This can cause in a wide variety of different problems as well. For instance, when the computing system manufacturer generates updates to the base system, applying updates to all the various instances of the customized applications can be difficult, time consuming and error prone because they are all different. This is the case even for two different customized applications in the same industry. Because they were developed and customized by different people, even though they perform relatively similar functions, they are different systems and therefore applying updates to each of them can be difficult as well.
The discussion above is merely provided for general background information and is not intended to be used as an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter.